Tech.Buz.

Musical Chairs

You've Got Patronage

January 22, 2001|By James Coates.

While the new administration's Cabinet appointments get all the ink, the transition of power from Democrats to Republicans also includes thousands of lesser jobs, everything from secretaries in the White House to the Secretary of the Air Force.

Of course, for every hired Republican there must be a fired Democrat, and a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based outfit, Contact Designs Inc., leaps into the breach with companion job-hunting Web sites: www.gopjob.com and www.demjob.com. Both sites specialize in employers who do their hiring based on political affiliation, including the political parties themselves and the incoming administration. Significantly, the Republican site has GOP job-seeking veteran Bob Dole for a spokesman, but there is no VIP endorsement on the Democrat side. Yet!

MUSICAL CHAIRS II

TUNES INSIDE

Intel Corp.'s latest plot to prop up paltry Pentium purchases focuses on making your desktop computer the heart of your home music-playing system. Key to the strategy is a 4-ounce gadget called the Intel Pocket Concert Audio Player, a supercharged version of other MP3 computer music players that comes with an optional docking station for your living room high fidelity system.

You still use your computer to fill the gizmo with MP3 files ripped from your CD music collection or pirated by way of Napster. But then you can carry the player to the living room and feed it into the docking station that connects to the hi-fi just like another shelf unit.

MUSICAL CHAIRS III

DIGITAL BLUES

Over at Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos' troops are offering techies on their e-mail lists a 30 percent discount on a particularly appropriate new CD by jazz organist Jimmy Smith, "Dot Com Blues," a riff known all too well by Internet workers this winter.

The first cut of the album, which features B.B. King, Etta James and Dr. John, captures the current Yuppie angst with "Only In It For The Money." The last cut fits better still for the newly graduated, wet-behind-the-ears Web puppies who tanked before their options got above water. It is called "Tuition Blues."

STEVE'S GOT RHYTHM

AND FEW BLUES

I know you didn't ask, but Steve Case, chairman of the newly merged America Online/Time Warner media behemoth, had a very merry Christmas. A whopping 70,000 people opened up boxes with new computers and signed up for AOL membership that day, the largest single sign-up in the company's history and 30,000 more than Christmas 1999. With business booming like that, and AOL just announcing it now has 27 million members worldwide, maybe sweet spring will follow this Internet Winter after all.